The discomfited Leopold swept back at the head of his mercenaries, 9000 foot and 3000 horse, through Alsace and along the Danube to Linz and so to Prague, marauding, harrying, and black-mailing the country as he went.  He entered the city on the 15th of February 1611, fighting his way through crowds of exasperated burghers.  Sitting in full harness on horseback in the great square before the cathedral, the warlike bishop compelled the population to make oath to him as the Emperor’s commissary.  The street fighting went on however day by day, poor Rudolph meantime cowering in the Hradschin.  On the third day, Leopold, driven out of the town, took up a position on the heights, from which he commanded it with his artillery.  Then came a feeble voice from the Hradschin, telling all men that these Passau marauders and their episcopal chief were there by the Emperor’s orders.  The triune city—­the old, the new, and the Jew—­ was bidden to send deputies to the palace and accept the Imperial decrees.  No deputies came at the bidding.  The Bohemians, especially the Praguers, being in great majority Protestants knew very well that Leopold was fighting the cause of the Papacy and Spain in Bohemia as well as in the duchies.

And now Matthias appeared upon the scene.  The Estates had already been in communication with him, better hopes, for the time at least, being entertained from him than from the flaccid Rudolph.  Moreover a kind of compromise had been made in the autumn between Matthias and the Emperor after the defeat of Leopold in the duchies.  The real king had fallen at the feet of the nominal one by proxy of his brother Maximilian.  Seven thousand men of the army of Matthias now came before Prague under command of Colonitz.  The Passauers, receiving three months pay from the Emperor, marched quietly off.  Leopold disappeared for the time.  His chancellor and counsellor in the duchies, Francis Teynagel, a Geldrian noble, taken prisoner and put to the torture, revealed the little plot of the Emperor in favour of the Bishop, and it was believed that the Pope, the King of Spain, and Maximilian of Bavaria were friendly to the scheme.  This was probable, for Leopold at last made no mystery of his resolve to fight Protestantism to the death, and to hold the duchies, if he could, for the cause of Rome and Austria.

Both Rudolph and Matthias had committed themselves to the toleration of the Reformed religion.  The famous “Majesty-Letter,” freshly granted by the Emperor (1609), and the Compromise between the Catholic and Protestant Estates had become the law of the land.  Those of the Bohemian confession, a creed commingled of Hussism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism, had obtained toleration.  In a country where nine-tenths of the population were Protestants it was permitted to Protestants to build churches and to worship God in them unmolested.  But these privileges had been extorted by force, and there was a sullen, dogged determination which might be easily guessed at to revoke them should it ever become possible.  The House of Austria, reigning in Spain, Italy, and Germany, was bound by the very law of their being to the Roman religion.  Toleration of other worship signified in their eyes both a defeat and a crime.